1967
Today’s Email: “Thank you for signing up for the [New York Times] Vietnam ’67 newsletter. Over the course of the next year, we’ll examine the participation of the United States in the long war in…
Yiddish Writers/4
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…
Not This Spotlight, Please!
Yet, one cannot but wonder whether incessant complaints about Bourdieu’s style and terminology are not a symptom of a deeper and different problem, since other “difficult” writers—Habermas, Foucault, or even Weber come to mind—do not…
Share the Wealth with Nicole McLaughlin: How Medical School Has Made Me Healthier – Wellness, Unity and Gratitude
Nicole is a second year medical student at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, a medical program well-known for its curricular changes and focus on wellness that serve to improve students’ mental health during their…
What I Can Use: Notes on Waldman and Birman’s Civil Disobediences
“Emerson was not a systematic reader, but he had a genius for skimming and a comprehensive system for taking notes…. He read rapidly, looking for what he could use.” p. 67 “He read widely in…
The Usefulness of Human Rights
Reading the odd, short book Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, I was reminded of the gripping 1979 study by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky on “the political economy of human rights.” The…
One Thing Leads to Another
Z studied with meIn a Social Justice class fall 2007 I learned that semesterHow much Z loved poetry They kept a notebook of new wordsThey’d come across and then make the words a part of…
Commonplace Books
From the Be in Love with Yr Life class, Annie Kratzmeyer was telling me about the commonplace notebooks she fills. Here’s a page of one of mine. What Emerson kept, and what he recommended enthusiastically…
A Witness to Power’s Mendacity
A while back I reread David Barsamian’s first collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, entitled Chronicles of Dissent. Actually, I first heard the material starting in the mid-1980s, listening to Barsamian’s cassette tapes of interviews…
The Good News of Inspiration from Rereading Lindsey Trout Hughes’s Letters and Poems
In the last year and a half, I have benefited enormously from exchanges with Lindsey, who lives in Brooklyn.